Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
15,535
result(s) for
"History-Slavery"
Sort by:
Black Business History
The study of Black business in the United States provides a lens into the complexities of Black social, economic, and political history through eras of struggle and moments of progress. Historian of Black business Robert Weems has suggested that Black left critiques of capitalism have kept many historians of Black life and culture from pursing Black business as a topic of inquiry. Regardless of an ideological position on the topic of capitalism, over the past few decades, scholars have addressed Black business history expertly by charting the intersections of business and the institution of slavery with the political economy of Black businesses from Reconstruction up to the Civil Rights Movement. They have also uncovered the challenges of Black business viability after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Each time period in the history of Black business provides an array of perspectives on gender, leadership, networks of capital, and strategies for consolidating and leveraging power. On the whole, Black business history gives readers a view into the Black experience that troubles the notion that economic attainment can circumvent the indignities of racism, while also demonstrating the ways that individual wealth has provided Black entrepreneurs access to power.
Reference
Slaves and Englishmen
Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-seventeenth century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. They understood the legal and philosophic rationale of slavery in different cultural contexts and, for good reason, worried about the possibility of their own enslavement by foreign Catholic or Muslim powers. While opinions about the benefits and ethics of the institution varied widely, the language, imagery, and knowledge of slavery were a great deal more widespread in early modern England than we tend to assume.In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world.
eBook
Police, Police Brutality, and Black Resistance
In this essay, I will discuss the vexing history of the relationship between African Americans and the police in the United States. The history of policing begins before the founding of the United States. Well before uniformed police departments emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, a variety of policing institutions existed in colonial America, such as the constable and the watchmen system that derived from the British. The constable, under the direction of the justice of the peace, dating back to the thirteenth century, was responsible during the day for a variety of functions, including executing court orders, eliminating health hazards, catching criminals, and keeping a lookout for suspicious people and strangers. The night watchmen, on the other hand, responded to fires, raised the hue and cry if they detected criminal activity, and kept the streetlamps lit. While there were regional and local variations of these systems—for example, in some areas there were sheriffs and marshals—these policing institutions were unified into policing departments across the country in the mid-nineteenth century. In neither the constable-watch systems nor the early uniformed police departments were crime prevention the police's primary function. They were concerned with what police historians call “order maintenance,” and more significantly, they also held the discretion to determine what “order” meant and how to enforce it. As one historian of urban policing writes, “they took initiative in preserving health and order rules that affected the community as a whole, and they responded to requests from individual victims of criminal offenses. 1 In the south, police departments developed in the mid-nineteenth century from the coalescing of various colonial and antebellum policing institutions, such as slave patrols, constabularies, and the town watch. Slave patrols coexisted with, and partly emerged from, the constable-watch system. South Carolina's slave patrol, for example, developed in 1690s, but unlike policing institutions for the free population in British colonial America, the patrol's antecedent was in Barbados, then a slave colony in the British Caribbean.2 Policing, of course, was not only tied to controlling slaves but also to class conflict, immigration, and urbanization. Region, demographics, political dynamics, and the economy mattered. Historian Sam Mitrani has shown how business elites in the late nineteenth century used the police to control Chicago's emerging industrial economy and multiethnic working class.3 Thus, far from originating as an institution that prioritized crime prevention, police departments have evolved over time. That evolution, since the beginning and into the present, has included the powerful, using police authority and discretion to criminalize, that is to mark criminal marginalized groups, thereby reinforcing that group's marginality.
Reference
Creole Catholicism before Black Catholicism: Religion and Slavery in French Colonial Louisiana
The development of Afro-creole Catholicism in French colonial Louisiana preceded the interpretive category and historical experience of \"Black Catholicism\" in American history. A critical analysis of the creolization of Catholic and African identities reflects current trends in religious and Africana studies that seek to deconstruct essentialized categories associated with \"Black religion.\" [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
The Shadows of the Evening Stretched Out
Richard Robinson was an important and neglected figure in the early history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The AME Church's success in its first forty-six years of existence should be attributed partly to Robinson's wise, patient, and steady long-term leadership. This study examines his conversion and call to the ministry. It closely analyzes his interest in transnational ministry, especially his mission work in Haiti. In addition, it pays attention to his role as a pastor and mentor to other clergy, the limitations to which his lack of literacy subjected him, his cautious antislavery activity, and the impetus to civil rights activity caused by Robinson's sudden demise while riding a segregated Philadelphia streetcar. The article also examines methodological limitations relating to working with illiterate subjects. Robinson's combination of idealism in education, commitment to transnational ministry, and pragmatism in politics helped to shape the AME Church for generations to come.
Journal Article